Once economics came to be understood as the scientific investigation of the operation of markets, economic theorists pushed ethical and metaphysical concerns outside their realm of study. After the separation, the claims of Christian theology had no more jurisdiction over the discipline of...

Over the last thirty years of his life, the Chicago economist Frank H. Knight concentrated his efforts on the elaboration of a new liberalism for the post-war era. Three things were necessary, he argued, to restore health to liberalism. First, free society required an appreciation for the basic...

Two stories currently circulate regarding Frank Knight's relationship to the Chicago School of Economics. The first is a story of tradition, emphasizing the continuity of Chicago economics; the other emphasizes the new beginnings in the post-war period. The second story even implies that the...

Two central figures of the defense of classical liberalism against the onslaught of socialism in the mid-twentieth century were F.A. Hayek and Frank H. Knight. Despite their shared purpose and intellectual common ground, Knight criticized Hayek's understanding of liberalism severely. The paper...

Frank H. Knight's antagonism to religion is well-known, and features prominently in his writings from the 1930s on. But during the 1920s, when he was a professor at the University of Iowa and wrote some of his most important essays on the limitations of economics, Knight was an active...

Economies of the Midwest United States led the world in entrepreneurialism, wealth creation, and economic transformation in the 20th century. But the institutions created to maintain that wealth are now constraining the region's capacity to make the changes necessary to adapt to the new global...

In the post-war period, the economics department at the University of Chicago consciously designed an institutional infrastructure to support the application of the analytical tools of price theory, monetary theory and econometrics to the study of competitive markets. Drawing upon a particular...

Introduction to the publication of the correspondence of Frank Knight and Fred Kershner, Knight's longtime mentor and friend. The paper follows the punctuated chronology of the correspondence, covering the early years after their departures from Milligan College, their interaction during their...